The difference between EE and CE, and why you pay the money, is that bug fixes get rolled in more quickly and you get support from Liferay. Depending on the service level that you opt for, you could have your bug fix in as a little as 24 hours. Other than that, both are, for all intents and purposes, the same platform. You can even take CE, manually apply all the bug fixes, and build your own ersatz-"EE" if you're really *that* motivated. I, quite frankly, am not. It's worth the dollars, in my time alone, not to have to build it myself.
I would recommend though, that you talk to the guys about getting a development instance license. It's quite a bit cheaper than a production license.
